We are working on a continuing SharePoint 2010 support project for a group of school one of the features they require is the ability for students to be able to have a drop box to submit their work to teachers, this is a perfect example of the use of mail enabled document libraries in SharePoint so I thought while I am writing this up I may as well share how to setup this function. This post will be divided into five parts:-

1)      Configuring SMTP on the SharePoint Servers
2)      Configuring Exchange 2010 to route mail to SharePoint
3)      Configuring Active Directory
4)      Configuring SharePoint 2010 Central Admin
5)      Document Library Configuration

Configuring the SMTP service on SharePoint 2010

The first step we need to do in the setup is to add and configure the SMTP service on one of our SharePoint web front end servers. I will be setting this up on a farm configuration with 2 web front end servers and 1 application server.

The SMTP service is vital for mail flowing into SharePoint so your first port of call is to log onto your chosen SharePoint server and open server manager and navigate to features here we can add the SMTP service



As you can see from the illustration below after the service is installed the server MAY require a restart in my case this was not needed but it may be needed on your server so please be aware that you may have to have some down time in your setup so plan accordingly.




As you can see from the illustration above the setup of the service is now complete and no restart was required. The next step is to configure the service through IIS manager on the server, for this you will need to use IIS manager 6 here at Twynham we install this role during the setup of our servers but you may not, if not installed open Server manager|Roles|Add Roles|IIS 6 Management Compatibility through this interface which you can see below we can manage SMTP



Right click on SMTP Virtual Server and choose properties once open click on the access tab and then click the Authentication button “Anonymous Access” should be ticked.



Next step click OK and then click the Connection button and ensure that “All except the list below” radio button is selected and click ok



The final button to click is the relay button and make sure that “Only the list below” radio button is selected and also make sure that you see a tick in “Allow all computers which successfully authenticate to relay regardless of the list above”



You can also fine tune the permissible message size by going into the messages tab this could be crucial for students sending in attachments via email so please make sure this is set to a reasonable limit.



You will find that all the settings are pre-set out of the box the only setting that you will really need to check is the Start-up type on the SMTP service by default this is set to manual so obviously change this to automatic



"A quick Note from the field is that I have found that if you restart your exchange server you will need to restart the SMTP service on your SharePoint servers, we route our internal mail from an ISA server to Exchange 2010 and this needs to be done after each restart of the Exchange box.”